Metadata, Tagging and Folksonomies

Without realising, the majority of our time on the Internet is spent tagging. With this in mind, to begin with it is important to distinguish the difference between the Internet and the World Wide Web. The World Wide Web (the www in the html address’ of different sites) supports a very distributed way of thinking about the world. The web itself isn’t specifically structured; it is merely just the collaboration of everyone’s individual searches.  When constructing a search on sites such as Google, the answers Google consider the most relevant appear at the top, but our searches are all personalised from our IP address. This is furthermore an example of tagging, the sites recognise our previous history and determine the extended answer around this. The small actions completed by us throughout our internet usage calculates our future answers.

According to Tech Terms.com, “Metadata describes other data. It provides information about a certain items content.” Further “Web pages often include metadata in the form of meta tags. Description and keywords meta tags are commonly used to describe the web pages content.” Metadata is a form of tagging and searching; metadata is technically the specific data that describes other forms of data. It is in fact possible to view the metadata for every site on the web. An example of this is indicated below.....

Ultimately, we do not control our personal tagging. The majority of tags that take place we are generally oblivious to, or unaware of. Tagging can occur, as a former way of organising your blog posts, another example that appears to be present in our lives, is human tagging on Facebook or Twitter. Like metadata, the tags allow the user to add various links. We can tag through both videos and photos as a form of human tagging; additionally we can also tag through additional searches. These explorations can occur on twitter, an example of this is the search of a trending topic through the use of a hash tag (#). It is also possible to invent a tag to suit the agenda of your tweet, this is formally creating your own search through the use of metadata. The photo below is an example of me creating a trend that has not appeared on Twitter before..... 

There are, like many different aspects in life, pros and cons for the use of tagging on the Internet. The pros mainly include our ability to understand our knowledge further. It additionally allows us to track where we are by the use of individuals tagging. Of course, the use of knowing where someone is can also count as a disadvantage to the use of tagging. Someone’s privacy is exposed and it could furthermore cause a threat on the specific individual.